Published By: Bookouture
Pages: 292
Released On: 30/06/2023
I gaze at my husband’s once handsome face, so still and pale in the hospital bed. The doctors say I should keep talking. He might be able to hear me even after the terrible accident that left him fighting for his life. But all I have to whisper to my husband is this: I know what you did.
Every day I wave my husband Damon off with a kiss and a smile, drive our precious children to school, and make sure our house is pristine before preparing a delicious meal. I pretend I’m not filled with fury that he once nearly destroyed our perfect life. It’s important to carry on as normal.
That is, until the accident.
My husband was hit by a car. It was pouring with rain. Nobody saw what happened. But the police are asking questions…
Do they know about the terrible argument we had that day?
Do they know about the text message I sent, telling someone to Delete everything?
And do they know that no one is happier that my husband is in a hospital bed, than me?
*****
Thanks to NetGalley and Bookouture for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.
This is my first of Nicola Trope’s books, but I’ve had a read of some of the other blurbs and they all sound really interesting.
There are three main points of view: Marla, Sonia and Athena. At first, you do have to concentrate on who is who and how they’re related to the story, but once you’ve sorted that, then you get the hang of it. Unfortunately, I have to say I didn’t particularly like any of them, I had no sympathy for them being in the situation they were, they were too whiny and they all acted like the victim, and so I didn’t really care about their stories, individually or as a collective.
There’s many secondary characters: wives and husbands, lovers, siblings, friends, colleagues, children strangers – all going round this complicated rollercoaster, and I found myself forgetting who some of them were.
Like I say, I’ve not read her books before, but reading other reviews, I can see she’s generally considered to be an excellent writer, but this felt off. It feels a bit basic, with no emotion, like she had been filling out a template of how to write a book.
It’s not quite the whodunnit thriller I was expecting. Maybe I misjudged the genre. But it wasn’t fast-paced, in fact it was quite slow and a bit…tepid.
It feels a bit repetitive at times. There’s not much going on. I’ve always said I prefer character development over plot, which would be find as there’s not much plot here, but for me there’s wasn’t any character development either. It didn’t seem to go anywhere.
I also found the ending a bit off. The last 10-15% felt like a completely different book and it felt rushed, like the author didn’t know how to finish it so just wrote anything to get it done. Sadly, overall, this wasn’t the book for me.
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